Neighbors described Dykes as a man who once beat a dog to death with a lead pipe, threatened to shoot children for setting foot on his property, and patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight and a firearm.

* * *

Michael Creel said Dykes kept to himself and listened a lot to conservative talk radio.

“He was very into what’s going on with the nation and the politics and all the laws being made. The things he didn’t agree with, he would ventilate,” he said.

* * *

James Arrington, police chief of the neighboring town of Pinckard, put it differently.

“He’s against the government, starting with Obama on down,” he said.

* * *

“I think he’s just a really angry and bitter guy with some anger management issues,” Dees said. “He is just against everything — the government and his neighbors.”

Comments

“The government and his neighbors” – hatred of both seems a central tenet of contemporary right-wing ideology, which is built around a hysterical fear that one’s neighbors are somehow ‘mooching’ off you, enabled by some ‘secular socialist’ government. It’s basically just based no contempt for other people, so this is what we should expect.

This might sound strange, but this kind of thing is greatly enabled by social isolation and people who get their ideas about life from television and radio bubbles rather than life. I mean, if the average Fox News viewer just shut off the TV and spent some time in the broader society, how long would they be able to believe the nonsense?